Friday, 19 August 2011

AK mistakes revealed

I'm back from a brief holiday in Newark. Making this an approriate time to reveal the mistakes in that description of Snake River's AK Session.

To remind you, here's the quote:

"AK Session is traditional English mild ale. Mild refers to its low hopping rate. Mild is an ale intended to be consumed in quantity, thus the name “session”. AK is thought to stand for “Ale Kyte”, Flemish for “small ale”. This is a tawny colored brew that was a favorite among the farmers and laborers of the West Midlands. The alcohol content is 3.9% abv. This beer is a collaboration between Chris Erickson and Cory Buenning."

The first is pretty obvious: AK is a type of Pale Ale, not Mild. Bloody McMullens, by badging their AK as a Mild for a while they've led many to believe AK = Light Mild. An error repeated in David Sutula's Mild Ale book. It's another example of people not understanding what "mild" meant in the 19th century. As you can see from the table below, in no case is AK described as Mild Ale. The closest is "mild bitter Ale", where mild is clearly referring to the fact that it's unaged. "Bitter" or "Pale Ale" appear in the vast majority of the descriptions.

There are no real errors in sentence three. But session is a very modern was of describing low-gravity beers. And I've most often seen it associated with Bitter, i.e. Session Bitter.

"AK is thought to stand for “Ale Kyte”, Flemish for “small ale”." Good bit of garbling there. I think they mean "ankel koyt" (though there are many different spellings of koyt: keyte, keut, kuyte). This is Martyn Cornell's theory of the derivation of AK. It doesn't mean small ale, but single Koyt. The standard form of Koyt as opposed to double Koyt. Personally, I don't believe this theory for a minute. There's a couple of hundred years gap between Flemish brewers settling in England an the name AK appearing. But that's another argument

"a tawny colored brew". I'm not sure what colour they mean with that description. But it sounds darker than the pale colour of AK.

"a favorite among the farmers and laborers of the West Midlands" Er, no. AK was mostly brewed in the South. As the map below shows. I can only see three that could possible be describes as West Midlands: Stafford, Stourbridges and Stratford. I think they're getting confused with Dark Mild, which still retains some popularity around Birmingham.

14 comments:

Rod
said...

I think I drank McMullens' AK in the late '80's in one of their tied pubs in Loughton, Essex - would that be right?Otherwise, growing up in Dorset, going to college in Birmingham, and living in London since 1978 I can't recall ever seeing a beer called AK - what was is normally called, or what brands might I have seen?

I really don't think a lot of this is the individuals who regurgitate most of this tripe. It does perpetuate falsities though. I know a lot of people that have talked to me and emailed me about the Lets Brew stuff feel almost betrayed that what they've originally learned from books and such is that they are wrong. Having been one of those people its entirely frustrating. However, I think once people realize they have nothing invested in false histories, the do a good job of trying to help people learn about the facts.

Ron, I've been reading along for a bit, recreated some of the AK's you & Kristen have posted. So I'm sorry to bring up Wikipedia into this. I'm really not trying to troll.

But are you and Martyn Cornell in agreement about this or is there a nuance I've missed in your posts & comments? His 2008 post is the citation that the Wiki writer uses to justify AK as a mild. And I must confess that I don't know whether he's weighed in more recently about this.

Thank you for clearing that up, it was very confusing to have the AK listed as a mild, but it was reinforced by the BJCP listing the bottom end of the SRM range at 12. McMullens fresh is great having had copious amounts in St Albans, but I could never understand why a "light" mild wouldn't get classified into the huge range of beers called "bitters". Can you offer an opinion based on historical record as to the correct SRM range for proper milds?